A German national has been arrested in Russia for “transporting explosives” and “terrorism”, with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) accusing him of blowing up a pipe at a gas distribution station in Kaliningrad.
The FSB said on Wednesday that the man, named Nikolai Gaiduk, was involved in an attack in March in the Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea using a homemade bomb.
He was arrested during a subsequent attempt to enter Kaliningrad from Poland, when border guards searched his car and found 0.5 liters of liquid explosive.
According to the FSB, Nikolai Gaiduk, who was born in 1967 and lives in Hamburg, acted on the instructions of a Ukrainian also living in this northern German city.
“Steps are currently being taken to identify and bring to justice those people who helped Gaiduk… carry out illegal activities,” the FSB said.
The German Foreign Ministry has not yet made any comments.
According to Russian authorities, the explosion of the pipeline in Kaliningrad caused a fire but did not cause any casualties.
(Reporting by Anastasia Teterevleva in Moscow, with Mark Trevelyan in London and Miranda Murray in Berlin, French version Tangi Salaün, editing by Blandine Hénault)
